If you’re a restaurant owner looking to expand your business, you might be researching the best neighborhoods for your next location, or carefully planning how you’ll pay for the massive start-up costs. But there’s an alternative road you can follow that makes restaurant expansion simpler, cheaper, and a lot more nimble: Buying a food truck.

Our friends at VendingTrucks.com helped us put together this fantastic white paper laying out all the advantages of running a food truck operation, even for restauranteurs who already have established brands. (That’s right — food trucks aren’t just for culinary newbies anymore.) So before you open another brick-and-mortar location, consider the following:

Food Trucks Have Cheaper Startup Costs: Opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant will cost you $500,000 for your first month of operation, on average — and that’s if you’re renting the building. If you choose to construct a new building yourself, your costs could reach $1 million.

By comparison, a custom fabricated food truck will only cost you about $50,000-$150,000, depending on the equipment you need installed. And instead of paying a small fortune in personnel costs — think about all the waiters, busboys, and hosts you need to keep your brick-and-mortar restaurant running smoothly — staffing a food truck requires just two or three people to serve your mobile clientele.

Food Trucks Go Everywhere: With a brick-and-mortar restaurant, you’re stuck in one place, hoping that customers show up. With a food truck, you can go where the most demand is on a given day. Locations like busy downtown areas, college campuses, music festivals, and sporting events all have hordes of hungry potential customers, just waiting for you to serve them

A food truck is also a fantastic tool for market research, especially if you’re committed to opening another brick-and-mortar restaurant in the future. Want to know if your food will be well received in a particular neighborhood? Set up shop for a few weeks on different streets in the area you’re considering, and you’ll have all the feedback you need.